LAS CRUCES — It's been a very good year for Amy Lanasa, whose eclectic career includes triple-threat skills as an actor, director and writer for both stage and screen.

She just finished a run as "Angel," the poignantly funny star of a revival production of Mark Medoff's Obie Award-winning "When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?" at Las Cruces Community Theater, and recently scored back-to-back writing awards. She won first place honors for "When You Marry the Man" in the SouthWest Writers Association screenwriting competition in New Mexico in September. In October, at the Centre Stage Festival of New Plays competition in Greenville, S.C., Lanasa's "The Iris Incident," took top honors of three semi-finalists' plays chosen to be produced from 400 plays submitted.

Her plays have been produced throughout the United States and she's currently finishing a new work, "Twitch," which will have a world premiere in March at Las Cruces' Black Box Theatre.

"I'm confident Amy can become an elite playwright. She's also an equally fine screenwriter, as evidenced by the attention she's getting in that arena. Stephanie and I felt as proud of Amy's accomplishment as of the accomplishments of our own children," said Tony-Award-winning, Oscar- nominated playwright Mark Medoff.

It's a burgeoning career that might never have happened.

Lanasa said she ran into Medoff when she was an undergraduate majoring in acting.

"He asked me to take his playwriting class and told me I could drop out," if she didn't have resources or interest to continue.

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"When I met Amy at the University of Oklahoma, she was 19 and told me she wasn't a playwright. Shortly thereafter, I told her, yes, she was," said Medoff.

Her first play, "Drive-In America," was selected as the Region VI Best Short Play Award-winner and was showcased at the 2001 Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival in Washington, D.C.

"I was very lucky to cross paths with someone who could see something in me that I couldn't see in myself," she said.

"We moved onward together to Florida State University where she continued in my classes for three years," said Medoff, who calls Lanasa "one of the most gifted students I've had over 46 years of teaching. Beyond her gifts as a writer, however, she's a terrific actor and rapidly becoming the sort of teacher who has great and long-term influence on myriad students. In her six years at NMSU, she has proven herself to be a teacher and colleague of the sort students and other teachers dream should be integral to their lives."

Last year, she received NMSU's Patricia Christmore Faculty Teaching Award for excellence in teaching.

Lanasa, 33, holds a bachelor's degree in acting from the University of Oklahoma and two master's degrees: an M.F.A. in professional writing and an M.A. in theater studies, with an emphasis in playwriting, from Florida State University's School of Film, Television and Recording Arts. She is now an assistant professor at New Mexico State University's Creative Media Institute.

"When I was asked to help create the Creative Media Institute, Amy was one of the first people then-director Jonathan Benson and I hired," Medoff said.

Writing is her occupation of choice, she said, "if I had my druthers, but I don't think I'd be a writer without teaching students who have asked really tough questions for the last six years. Teaching is lifegiving, an energy exchange."

Teaching, literature and storytelling are in the family DNA.

"My parents (Phil and Betty Criscoe Lanasa) were both college professors," said Lanasa, a Texas native who grew up in the Houston suburban community of Clear Lake, "surrounded by books, with a mom who read to me a lot. Sally Ride jogged by our house. There were lots of astronauts' and engineers' and professors' kids. It was a fun place to grow up."

She's also accrued some film credits. She appeared with Linda Hamilton and Chris Payne Gilbert in Medoff's 2010 indie film, "Refuge."

She wrote and directed "The Persephone Clause," a short film with a provoking plot: "After their wedding, Franklin reveals a secret to Alice that turns her world upside down, whether she decides to stay married or not."

The secret: Alice's new hubby is the devil, and Lanasa's skillful handling of the premise, in its original form as a comedic play, won her top honors in New York's Kingsborough College Ten Minute Play Contest.

With Erika Bagnarello, she cowrote "Inner Sight," which was featured on the film festival circuit after its February 2007 premiere at the Directors' Guild of America Theatre in Los Angeles. "Cedar Palace," a feature-length drama cowritten with Ilana Lapid, was a semi-finalist in First Cut Film Series.

"My preference is to write for theater. I love ensembles and enjoy everything that happens between an audience and people on stage; the chemistry and collaboration. The minute a director takes a screenplay, it's their vision. A play is always yours. No one's going to hire someone to rewrite it," Lanasa said.

Though her subject matter can delve into dark realms that range from the agonies of addiction to the loneliness of dying, much of her work has a comedic edge.

"That's how I first knew I was really a writer, when I heard audiences laughing at 'Drive-In America.'"

She is inspired, she said, "by things that make me angry, things that I can't solve without writing about: pain, trouble, conflicts. My voice is still developing. I'm a writer of strong characters."

She's spent time in New York and Los Angeles, but frankly prefers Las Cruces.

"I really like it here. I've never lived in a place where people are as kind, even to total strangers. It's like an oasis, a hidden gem, with so much talent. I feel not isolated, but insulated, here. It's a great place to write," Lanasa said.

S. Derrickson Moore can be reached at (575) 541-5450. Follow her on Twitter @DerricksonMoore.

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